Autumn festival

Saturday Afternoon

Assembling the danjiri


Wiring up the lanterns


Portable shrines in the main shrine building


Flags

Sunday Morning

6 am
Danjiri gathering at the shrine


Miyauchi kids


The Miyauchi Taliban. Forced to drink Asahi Super Dry


Cranking out the noise with drum and bell


6:30 am
In the shrine. Sake. Devils. Horseplay


Looking back through the temple gate


Lion dance. Old men drumming.


Acrobatics - cartwheels


Acrobatics - soixante-neuf


Very foxy


Wind getting up


7 am
Running the danjiri up and down the street


The kids are getting excited


By the river


Beer break


8 am or thereabouts
Momo shows up. Dogs aren't sure what to make of human festivals.


Monday

Happi and koikuchi in the house. Must be a festival on


Oh my God


Fancy pants


Japanese weight-saving technology is not generally
applied to portable shrines


Shinto is a primitive, nature-based religion


The following weekend

Jika-tabi washed and drying. My neighbour,
Takaichi-san's family grave in the background

On seeing the first kuko of Autumn

Yesterday I noticed that the first wolfberries (kuko) are going red. This caused me no end of excitement because it means that I'll soon be on the path to eternal life thanks to all the antioxidants that I'll be consuming.

I thought it might also be a good idea to try a fresh wolfberry, but this proved to be a bit of disappointment. The berries had a distinctly uncooked vegetable-like taste, somewhat like raw aubergine (aubergine and wolfberry are the same family). One of them was also full of seeds.

I'm hoping that when the temperature drops, they'll start getting juicier and sweeter.

Pickled habaneros

In the summer, the local home centre was selling potted habanero pepper plants as the "hottest peppers in the world". I immediately had an image of the pickled jalapeño peppers I once enjoyed in a Mexican joint in Santa Monica and decided to have a crack at it.

The pepper bush didn't do very well over the summer, but in the autumn, it suddenly took off and provided a small crop of fairly ugly pale green and red peppers. Today as I was picking them, I nibbled part of one that had been holed by some insect and found it very hot. Indeed, my lips went numb and stayed that way for 20 minutes.

With no sensation in my lips, I washed the peppers, cut two slits in each, put them in an enamel saucepan with some 'rakyu' pickling vinegar and a big clove of garlic, cut into chunks. I simmered them for 5 minutes, omitting the salt and baby carrots in the recipe that I found online. Then I transferred them to an empty jam jar and shoved in some Italian parsley as a means of keeping the peppers fully submerged in the vinegar. With this method, the peppers are supposed to be edible immediately, and are said to keep for a month or two. By the almost transparent appearance of the peppers after an hour in the jar, I think I probably simmered them for 4 minutes longer than is necessary.

I'm looking forward to trying my first home-made pickled peppers - not without some trepidation, it must be said.

The Italian parsley has been visited recently by a pair of fantastically coloured caterpillars. Since they're so outrageously showy and more importantly, don't appear to be harming the parsley, I can't bring myself to kill them.

When Blake wrote,

The Caterpillar on the Leaf
Repeats to thee thy Mother's grief.

one can only assume that he had a different caterpillar in mind, because this one was completely silent on the subject.

And for bunce, a sunset panorama.


Conclusion:

Jesus Christ!

I tried one of these goddamn pickled habaneros with the tail end of dinner tonight, and Jesus Christ!

A fair old stink accompanied the opening of the jar, and a few seconds after I took a small bite of one these toxic peppers, pain filled my mouth and breathing became difficult. I experienced several violent hiccups that felt like depth charges going off in my stomach. As my discomfort became apparent, my family dissolved into mirth, with much sarcastic comment, "How is it, is it nice?", "That looks good, are you going to finish the jar off?" Speechless with distress, I could only throw myself back in my chair and sit with my head back and my mouth open. "You've gone all red, ha ha ha!" my family informed me gently. And when I tried to put my distress into words, the smell of the pepper in my mouth flew across the table and made my wife and son screw up their faces in disgust.

I managed to eat only half of one small pepper, and thankfully there was still some tofu on the table to assuage the nerve damage to my mouth. A chilled pear also helped in this regard. But the smell from the remainder of the habanero on my plate seemed to fill the whole dining room.

The question remains, what to do with this hazardous food product.

Wolfberry update

Autumn is when wolfberries are supposed to start fruiting, and indeed, they're becoming much more visibly active. The long, trailing stalks that the plants sent out in the summer are now covered in little buds and flowers.

During the summer, the plants didn't look too good. The long stalks (called vines by most people, but inaccurately to my mind since they don't cling), lay around untidily all over the place, prey to every kind of foliage eating thing that crawls on the ground. One insect that wreaked particular havoc is a species of leaf beetle, the "kuso ha-mushi", literally, the "shit leaf beetle". The larvae of this attractively-named orange beetle covers itself in its own excrement, of which it has lots, because it has a prodigious appetite. In fact it stripped most of the stalks almost completely, while the leaves that survived were full of holes. At first, I busied myself squashing each larva by hand, but they were legion, and squishing little agglomerations of shit isn't very nice. I then tried breaking up an old cigar (I've given them up) into water and spraying it on the plants. This made them smell interestingly of old cigar, but didn't deter the beetles and their ill-mannered children one jot. Then I tried spraying a 30-70 mixture of milk and water, which made the plants stink of milk. Since the larvae soon disappeared, either this treatment worked, or their season had come to its end. These beetles are supposed to be a significant pest for commercial growers, so I'll be watching out for them next year.

Left: Beetle, Right: Larvae
A photo borrowed from this Japanese site

Once this menace was past, I resolved to tie up the stalks to bamboo canes, and this seems to have been a good move. They look tidier, and they soon grew back dense new foliage. They also look as though they will eventually serve one part of their purpose, as a prickly hedge, quite admirably. I won't be sorry to see less of the concrete wall behind them either. I'm quite excited about my wolfberries, especially since they're putting forth what promises to be an abundant crop, yea, even in their very first year.

Behind the new growth, old leaves have been ravished
by the "shit leaf beetle" larvae

The leaves are supposed to be edible in salads and as garnishes. I nibbled on a young, tender leaf, and it didn't taste good. However, if the fruit proves as abundant as it hints, I shall be quite satisfied with that.

I've been reading up on wolfberries/goji and it seems the name goji is something of a fraud, and the extravagant claims made for Chinese wolfberries apply only to the Tibetan variety. More here.

The black soil that you can see in this photo is my own home-produced compost. I want my wolfberries to be surrounded by strong, drought-resistant clover, and so I reseeded it in compost from the bottom of my pile. It seems to be a rather superior product.

Those who are tempted to grow their own wolfberries may find this page a useful resource. I also enjoyed this page from a gardener in Pennsylvania.

Blueberry success

The blueberries that we had planted for us last year produced their first bumper crop. I ignored the urgings of various people to tear out the clover that surrounded them, and instead mulched the beds with pine branches which I'd read on the Net that they like. The clover grew up through the mulch, and I assume, provided the blueberries with nitrogen as opposed to competing savagely with them as our garden man had intimated. I did take care to provide them with regular water, and I daresay they would have done even better with more. One other factor in the large harvest is that the berries are planted in front of my office porthole, and whenever a local husband and wife bird couple came to sup on them I dashed out to chase them away. The fishing line that I tied just above the horizontals on the bamboo fence also denied them a place to sit before they hopped onto the bushes. (I'm sure I heard one of them say "#%$@! What is this damn string doing here!")

For all of August, our two varieties (whose names I forget) provided us with a goodly quantity for breakfast or dessert. One variety is has large and pale berry, while the other is round and black. They each have a distinct and different flavour.

We had so many berries in fact, that some were shrivelling on the bush before we could eat them. Noting this wasteful situation, the missus broke with precedent and ventured out into the garden with a basket to collect them for jam. The young master went out too, but was too busy slapping at the mosquitoes on his legs to help much.

The jam was cooked with a couple of tablespoons of sugar and a mere splash of water. Nothing else. It's rather rougher in texture than shop-boughten jam, but it's naturally sweet and contains no preservatives. It goes nicely with yoghurt.

Incidentally, I have received a complaint from the missus that my photos of food are 'unappetising' and that I should ensure that there are no extraneous objects in the shot to detract from the food. Readers will kindly note that this is not one of those blogs that presents life in an idealized and enviable form, without ugliness and failure. No, this is one of those blogs that shows the clutter that surrounds us as we eat our imperfect home-produced food.

Dry this, dry that

I've always been impressed that you can take stuff like fresh vegetables and even meat that have a strong tendency to rot, and leave them out in the sun, and instead of going bad, they turn into a form that lasts indefinitely, more or less.

So now that we have a surplus of tomatoes and goya, I hurried down to the DIY store to get some drying equipment. I hummed and hahed about getting one of the bamboo trays with the convertible-roof style net, but they look like an invitation to little flies and ants since they don't seal so well. Instead I got one of the tightly zippered kinds that I've seen fishermen using for drying small fish.

The plan is to have dried tomatoes to keep in olive oil with basil, which I also grow, and goya tea which is hellish bitter, but very refreshing if you can actually swallow it. Having once got used to eating and drinking goya, I spend a large part of the year looking forward to the season. I also enjoy the pungent stink of the vine itself.

The wooden balcony gets so hot now, you can't stay in one place with bare feet, so it's a good temperature for drying things. You just have to hop about when you set up the drying net. After two days, the goya is already done, and the tomatoes are coming along nicely. The net keeps even little flies off completely. Since the net has to be taken inside at night in case it rains, which is a bit of hassle, it would seem to pay to do rather more at one go. Something to plan for next time. Today I bought two more tomato plants to ensure a larger surplus towards the end of the summer.

The weather forecast at the moment is 'sunny forever'. This is good for growing and drying tomatoes (I always think of the little suns as mini-tomatoes, and my family no longer even look up when I say "Mini-tomatoes all week".) It's a bit of a concern about the other plants that actually like a sip of water from time to time because there isn't any left, at least not in the rainwater tank. I feel guilty using the hose.

Oh, and I succeeded in growing a big orange American sugar pumpkin. In fact, one section of the garden is positively littered with the things. I hope they taste as good as they look*.


* They taste lousy - watery and thin. I won't be growing them again, although the fruit made an attractive decoration that added a very American Colonial flavour to our house.

Victimhood

No I'm not talking about having my blood sucked by mosquitos and itching for an hour afterwards. I'm talking about economic losses on a dramatic scale.

This week, I lost six high quality, organic watermelons to a crow. The normal chemical watermelons are selling at 580 yen at the moment. So that's a loss of 3,480 yen, more if you consider the value of organic produce. And the stupid vermin didn't eat all of the six watermelons. It ate the equivalent of one, and ruined the rest by pecking at them, leaving beak-sized holes for the ants to get in.

And just now when I went outside to sniff the air, I heard a rustling in the corn, and knew that it was a tanuki. I charged up the garden and heard it get over the fence into the mikan orchard next door where it waited while I inspected the damage. Again, it hasn't eaten in an orderly, economically responsible fashion. It has ripped and nibbled at each corn cob in turn, ruining about five, and trampling down some of the stalks.

The corn incident comes as an especially bitter blow since I spent some time this morning setting up nets over the Cannonball black watermelon patch where a crow had tasted but rejected an immature melon (not counted in the damage tally above). With a little foresight, I could have protected the corn. Last year, I lost all of my corn and most of my watermelons to drought, weeds and typhoons. This year, it's not all, but losing some to vermin is a serious annoyance.

This calls for determined protective measures.

OK, 'vermin' might be a bit harsh. Maybe, 'naughty little tinker' might have been fairer. When I went out to water later, my headlight picked out a pair of green eyes staring at me from the other side of the fence. I approached my nemesis talking to it in a soothing voice, and found it was a very young, very black tanuki, only the size of a small cat. I really like tanuki. They're always wary and maintain a safe distance, but they respond to being spoken to, and don't dart off and cower like cats. I put some of the opened cobs on the other side of the fence for it to eat later.

I'm still going to put nets round my next crop of corn though.